Perfectionist Liberalisms and the Challenge of Pluralism

Mats Volberg
Department of Philosophy, University of Tartu

Keywords:
perfectionism, value pluralism, Wall, liberalism

Abstract

Based on Steven Wall's work I take perfectionism in political philosophy to include two components: the objective good and the non-neutral state. Some perfectionist theories aim to be liberal. But given the objective good component perfectionism seems to be unable to accommodate the commitment to value pluralism found in liberalism, this is what I call the challenge of pluralism. The perfectionist reply is to claim that their objective good can also be plural and thus there is no conflict. My aim in this paper is to show that this reply does not work. I do this by looking at three different ways we could conceive of perfectionist theories as plural and show how each is unsatisfactory.